Interview with Graham Cluley Graham Cluley is the author of Jacaranda Jim and Humbug, two excellent text-only PC shareware adventures which have received rave reviews just about anywhere you care to look and been featured on several cover disks. @~First things first ... would you like to tell us a bit about @~yourself? I am 23 years old (or at least will be when this is published!), and have recently started work professionally as a computer programmer. I'm a bit of a mess, I don't own a comb, never iron my shirts, roll out of bed and trip over a pile of cheesie biscuits sort of person. I am single, but deeply in love with my beloved SquelchypoopsWiggleBottom who I met at Bristol Poly where I studied computing for two years. She's in Paris right now as part of her Modern Languages degree. My hobbies include music (Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, John Lennon etc), doodling and avoiding the dentist. @~When did you first get interested in computers and adventure @~games? My dad works at the Meteorological Office on the huge computer they have there. One day, it must have been about 1980, he bought a Sinclair ZX81 for my brothers and I to play with. I seemed to take the greatest shine to it, and started to write simple games (I didn't get enough pocket money to buy games!). A friend of my brother's brought round a copy of PLANET OF DEATH. It was a completely new concept for me, and it took me some time before I even began to understand the whole "concept" behind adventure games. It was some time later though before I tried to write my own. @~What made you decide to write your own adventures? I bought a magazine back in those days called Your Computer. I remember it had a very simple BASIC listing of an adventure game. I borrowed programming concepts from the game to create my own on a ZX81. They were simple little games, but a lot of fun. Not many people got to see them. Later our family upgraded our computer to a Memotech MTX512 (sounds like a motorbike, I know). On this computer with its massive 64k of memory I began work on a few megagames: SAUNIERE, HERBIE THE OWL and others I have completely forgotten the names of. Again, no one other than me ever got to play them. For my Computing O Level project I decided to write my own multi-user adventure game on a network of BBC computers. This had been inspired by tales of MUD in Micro Adventurer magazine. It worked quite well, all things considered. @~How did you come to write JACARANDA JIM? Jacaranda Jim was really written as a bit of fun. I was at Guildford College of Technology, doing a computer course, and we had just been taught the basics of Pascal programming. I thought it would be a good exercise to write an adventure game in this easy-to-use language and entertain my course-mates at the same time. I began work on Jim in late 1987 on the college's PRIME mini computer. The weak point was the PRIME's Pascal compiler which could take anything up to 45 minutes to compile the Jac Jim source code. There were some PCs at the college too and a friend showed me the Infocom games Lurking Horror and HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I was stunned at their quality and depth. With a little work Jim was converted to run on the PC. @~Where do the ideas come from for Jacaranda Jim and Humbug? Jim was a mishmash of influences. Part of it was characters and lecturers from the course I was on. Part of it was from previous games I have written like Herbie the Owl. In fact Jacaranda Jim was never called Jacaranda Jim in the first place. Originally the game was called Derek the Troll. Derek was my accounts lecturer at Guildford, who frequently muttered the word "Invoices" under his breath. Unfortunately pressure was put on me by other lecturers to take out all references to Derek and so Jacaranda Jim was born! Humbug was always intended as a Christmas game. Originally it was going to have the rather hackneyed plot of being set at the North Pole, and trying to rescue Santa Claus from Bongo the Wicked Elf. Then I thought, what about Christmas through the ages - hence the name HUMBUG - travelling back to Victorian times, and maybe even into the far flung future? Eventually I stuck upon the old faithful plot of "Rickety old manor, hidden treasure, creepy goings on..". Never fails! With Humbug I wanted to correct all the elements I felt hadn't worked in Jacaranda Jim. Thus there was improved character interaction (some people have said they have a Grandad just like the one in the game!), a sprawling map of fairly believable locations, a wider array of puzzles, and a wicked baddy - the dentist Jasper Slake! A lot of ideas and jokes from Humbug were pinched from The Case of Spindle's Crotchet. Spindle's Crotchet was intended to be the follow-up to Jacaranda Jim, but I never quite got round to finishing it. Spindle picked up the pieces where Jim left off: Having escaped Ibberspleen IV Jacaranda Jim and Alan the Gribbley are lured onto a mysterious space station. Alan is kidnapped by a hooded alien, and Jim teleports down to the nearby world of Kastria. Spindle is a large game but not really suitable for human consumption, maybe one day though.. @~There's loads of humour in both Jim and Humbug. Do you think @~it's harder to write a humorous game? I don't deliberately try to make my games funny. In fact there were points in Humbug where I tried to make it quite scary! Maybe I just wasn't very successful! I think there is a part of my character which is a bit silly and liable to put in childish jokes about bear cubs with woggles, and the Harlesden Glow Worm Regatta. I don't think you want to ostracize players by making the humour too silly, so I try and pitch it at just the right level. For me at least. If I manage to make people chuckle and titter, then that's great. @~There are some great characters in both games. I've heard that @~Alan the Gribbley is based on a real person - can you tell us @~more about him? Are any other characters (or animals ... ) drawn @~from real life? Alan! Good grief, what a weirdo. Alan was one of the men on my computer course at Guildford. To be serious for a moment he was, honestly, a bit of a "nutter". He had a Kevin Keegan haircut, a revolting beard, carried a copy of PC Tools with him everywhere, and wore a stripey jumper. For my work experience I was placed for a month with Alan in a confined space. It was not an episode I would like to live through again. He really did demonstrate his "I can kill a cow in 157 different ways with my bare hands" display on my feeble body. Basically, a looney. If you're ever in a Guildford pub and a man comes up to you humming a lot and talking about Invoices just watch it. Some other characters in Jacaranda Jim were based on fact too. Yitshak the Magic Elf was in fact my chum Sean, who had a rather natty line in anoraks. The Walrus was a ticket inspector on the Ascot-Guildford railway service with a particularly amusing moustache. References to a mysterious "Saryl Dwinden" were in fact there purely for the benefit of another student Daryl Swinden who lent me the use of his PC one long afternoon. Humbug too has a couple of characters well-known to me. I try and keep the number limited, so that people do not feel alienated whilst playing the games. Alex the Hacker is someone who registered Jacaranda Jim and grovelled so much I put him in Humbug. Jasper Slake is, of course, the quintessential screen baddy, moustache-twiddling into the sunset. Cue maniacal laughter. @~Both games are sold as shareware. What do you think of the @~shareware system? In your experience, does it work? I hate to sound a hippy but Shareware really is a truly groovy and wonderful thing. You can try out the programs for next-to-nothing and only if you like them do you have to pay any money. Shareware most definitely has worked for me. I have had something in the region of 2000 people buying my games. I know that there are probably many many more people than that playing my games, but I'm sure their conscience will get the better of them in the end! Shareware is particularly suited to adventure games for one very good reason. Adventure games are addictive. They become an obsession. You stay up all night, pulling your hair out because you can't beat the Octopus at Wubble-A-Gloop. When people send their registration fees to me I often can still see the toothmarks and insane dribbling all over the envelope. These are people back from the brink of madness. They want to beat that octopus, or find out what's in Sven's filofax if it kills them. And that's a really good reason for them to register. @~How did you go about getting your games on cover disks? Did @~that help to get them (and you) known? Shareware works. There can be no doubt about it. But it will only work well if you get as many people to play the games as possible. In the first year of selling Jacaranda Jim I had only 20 registrations. I was disappointed and felt I deserved better. But the reason I had so few registrations was that not many people had tried the game. After placing Jacaranda Jim on its first cover disk I was regularly receiving ten to twenty registrations a day. It was incredible.. and very hectic. Getting a game on a cover disk is easy: you just have to bully the magazine's disk editor. Camp on their doorstep, play the bagpipes at 3 in the morning outside their bedroom window, send them complimentary packets of cheesie biscuits. Most magazines have a little column telling you how to send in the disks. There are a few points to bear in mind, however. a. Keep the file sizes as small as possible. Jacaranda Jim's debut on a cover disk was delayed for a year as the original file size was about 200k long. Now, I have managed to squeeze the program down to about 70k using sophisticated text compression techniques. Luckily this isn't so important now as many magazines are turning to 3.5" disks. I have noticed that many AGT and TADS games seem to be quite large in the amount of disk space they take up compared to my own. This is not only a disadvantage in terms of cover disks, but shareware too. Bigger file sizes means less distribution. b. Make the game look as professional as possible. No rude jokes, minimal spelling mistkaes, and big easy instructions telling people how to send you oodles of money. c. Magazines are just like any other business: disorganised, apathetic, uninterested. Don't expect a reply even if they say they will, don't be disheartened if your game doesn't appear immediately. Eventually they will get so fed up with you writing in each week that they'll put one of your games on the disk to shut you up. d. Be original. Write your own game, not somebody else's. e. You won't necessarily make much money. You might not make any. Friends of mine have had programs on cover disks and scarcely earned anything. But adventure games, from my own personal experience, have got more chance than most. Yes, shareware has got me known. In fact I got my current job not because of any academic qualifications or my knowledge of computing, but because the Managing Director's young daughter played an arcade game I had written called Wilf. They liked the game so much that they wrote to me (and included a packet of cheesie biscuits!!) with the immortal words "If you want a job.. give us a ring". So I did. @~Who do you admire in the adventure world? Who are your @~favourite authors? I guess Infocom. Infocom produced so many games, I've got a lot to catch up on. But chaps like Steve Meretzky and Dave Leibling produced such fantastic storylines and ideas for puzzles. Throughout writing Humbug I kept saying to myself "I want this to be as good as an Infocom game". Another name I have recently come across is Michael Roberts of TADS fame. One thing I also toyed with was the idea of writing my own adventure creation language. Something that could save me development time and give me more free time to eat pizza. It looks like Michael has beaten me to it. I haven't had a proper chance to take a long look at TADS yet, but I think it suits my style far more than AGT would. The fact that TADS is virtually a language (and a simple language at that!) appeals to the programmer in me. I think a lot of people could write some excellent games in TADS, and I hope it receives the recognition it clearly deserves. People like Sierra-On-Line with their Leisure Suit Larry programs leave me cold. I don't find them very funny, or technically sophisticated. Maybe they've moved on a bit since I last looked at them, but I remember an appalling parser on one of them. Magnetic Scrolls I like, but Wonderland was a disappointment. The interaction of believable characters in Corruption has to make it one of my favourite games ever. Not that I ever managed to finish it mind you! @~As an adventure writer, do you find it easier to solve other @~people's games? You're kidding aren't you? Why do you think I took up writing adventures in the first place? It was to get back at the swines who ruined so much of my time with their impossible games! I don't think I have ever solved a quality adventure game without some form of (usually very major) assistance. There is a sadistic quality in every adventure writer which lets us sit there late at night, cackling over all those poor souls struggling to get past the gold door.. heh heh heh. @~What about your future plans? Is there another adventure in @~the pipeline? Another adventure? Another adventure? Everyone asks me this one. Errm. No. No plans. I have a couple of unfinished games lounging on my hard disk, but I am trapped by a desire to write a game to better Humbug. Humbug took about a year to write, and any new game would probably take a similar length of time. At the moment, I just don't have that time. Rather than using AGT or a similar adventure writing tool I code my games from scratch, in Turbo Pascal. This causes headaches beyond belief, but is probably worth it in the end. The games are quick and do not suffer from looking like a dozen other games. I have had a chance to take a brief look at TADS and I am certainly intrigued by it. It would cut down my development time considerably, whilst allowing me greater control over the code than AGT would. Another attractive aspect of TADS is its support for the Atari ST and Macintosh. I once tried converting Jacaranda Jim to the Atari, but it fell over at the first hurdle. I have recently started work at S&S International in Berkhamsted. I am working on a Windows version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit, the UK's leading anti-viral software. Believe me, this takes up a huge amount of time, and having spent hours sitting at a computer screen the last thing I want to do when I get home is start debugging my latest adventure. I am sure I will write another one. But it will probably have an additional gimmick to keep my interest. I feel I have achieved my aims in text adventuring with Humbug, and would want to do something special for a new game. Maybe a Windows adventure (with mouse control like Sorceror's Get All the Girls)? Graphics and sound also interest me, but there are problems in using these in shareware productions as the filesizes increase dramatically. At the moment I am concentrating on promoting the games I have already written, and supporting the many players who have bought them. I have recently arranged for someone to represent my games in the United States on my behalf, and handle the sales over there. It also seems likely that I will be able to promote some overseas adventures here in the UK, on behalf of an American author. @~Finally, what colour socks do you wear? Bumblebee red closely followed by cheese and onion. Thank you and goodnight. @~That's a goodnight from him and a goodnight from me - thanks, @~Graham, for both the interview and the SynTax Reader program. @~Without your help, there still wouldn't be a PC version of the @~magazine.